All, I am out of my area here so could use some advise on a problem I've been asked to help with.

I have had someone ask me to help and retrieve files from a hard drive that was running IBM AIX. I've done some research and understand that AIX runs on jfs2. I actually booted the machine and navigated the filesystem but could not find a way to export and data via network, hard drive, etc... I have it hooked up to a system that recognizes the drive and have the aptosid live DVD up and running but the drive isn't seen. I am sure there are additional steps needed.

Can anyone give me some clues? Thank you.

Chris

slh

Post subject: RE: Mounting a SCSI drive Posted: 16.08.2011, 13:32

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If SCSI IDs don't conflict and bus termination is correct, the drive should just be there (don't expect a removable media entry in dolphin though). Check dmesg and fdisk -l, I'm not sure which partition table format is used by AIX.

Edit: it's also often a good idea to check drive presence in the SCSI controller's BIOS, which sometimes offers to enable/ disable drives or provides simple disk checks.

wannek3

Post subject: RE: Mounting a SCSI drive Posted: 16.08.2011, 15:12

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A kernel module for the scsi-card should be loaded. Does "lsmod | grep scsi" give something useful? If you switched on the drive after booting, then rmmod and modprobe again will help finding the drive with dmesg.

clivesay

Post subject: RE: Mounting a SCSI drive Posted: 16.08.2011, 22:24

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OK, I did fdisk -l and I get /dev/sda 9100 MB so it's there. I see the bios recognize and identify the SCSI drive as an IBM at boot. When I look in /dev I only see an sda instead of sda1, sda2 etc...

Any idea what to do next?

Thank you!

slh

Post subject: RE: Mounting a SCSI drive Posted: 16.08.2011, 23:55

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AIX might use its own LVM implementation, which may not be compatible to linux' LVM2. But this is something you'll have to read up.

DeepDayze

Post subject: Re: RE: Mounting a SCSI drive Posted: 17.08.2011, 00:16

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slh wrote:

AIX might use its own LVM implementation, which may not be compatible to linux' LVM2. But this is something you'll have to read up.

Yes, LVM (IBM's implementation) is generally used to set up devices on an AIX system and looks like it is in this case.

It the poster has access to IBM's documentation its possible to ascertain how it is done so perhaps there might be a glimmer of hope in recovering the data on that drive.

I found one place where someone states that it can be mounted if the kernel has jfs support. That person said that Suse has it compiled into it's kernel so I will grab Suse and see what happens. I will let you know.

Did you just try mounting the device i.e. "mount -o ro /dev/sda /mnt"?

I would first take an image of the device though (dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/aix-sda.img) and then play with copies of that file using loop mounting (i.e. keep that image safe also once you get it). "mount -o ro,loop /path/to/aix-sda.img.copy /mnt"

Even if it ends up that you can't mount the device, you might be able to use photorec, from the testdisk package, on the image file to recover data from it, though it will take manual effort to then pick out what you want from the fairly raw dump of files photorec would give you.